Marriage equality and polygamy

Another week, another homophobic crywank by Bob McCoskrie – wait, no, that’s Garth McVicar! Saying marriage equality will lead to a gay crime wave! This isn’t predictable and boring, this is fantastic!

Anyway, to continue: … another pointless, copy-pasted “but what about POLYGAMY?????” derail on probably every blog post covering the topic.

When activists fervently deny any support for poly marriage, they’re bringing it onto the agenda, when previously the only person doing that was a dude who ran a nationwide campaign in support of assaulting children.

I just want to add one thing, per my comment to whinging unoriginal manchild par excellence, kiwi_prometheus:

Sure, there’s a really interesting conversation to be had about family structure and alternative relationship styles, but the simple fact is this: you don’t give a fuck about alternative relationship structures. You’re exploiting them to derail the current moves towards marriage equality.

You want to derail this entire societal debate away from the simple fact that there are loving, committed same-sex couples in this world who deserve the same legal recognition as two hetero flatmates getting hitched for the student allowance benefits.

You’re only bringing up polygamy because your team’s previous arguments, i.e. “why can’t I marry my dog”, have been definitely laughed off stage.

This “but what about THREE people getting married? Huh? HUH?” derail is simply exploitative. It’s exactly the same technique used by exactly the same crowd to derail conversations about violence against women – “but what about men who are victims of sexual violence? Why don’t you care about them?”

It’s really not funny how, the minute White Ribbon Week or No Diet Day or Womensfest ends, those guys apparently forget all about how much men suffer from sexual violence or body image issues or whatever it was they were trying to get you to shut up about.

Seriously, folks. We’re not dealing with a group of people who just sincerely believe that gay people cause hurricanes, and can be convinced otherwise with enough gentle discussion.

We’re not in a civilised little debate against opponents who just don’t understand how human rights work.

We are dealing with scary, controlling, unethical douchebags who will say literally anything if they think it has a chance of scaring the middle classes, the “ordinary Kiwis”, the people who aren’t necessarily anti- or pro-gay-marriage – just people without the time, energy, interest or inclination to be particularly political, and who might just believe Pillar of the Community Bobgarth McVicskrie if he swears very solemnly that un-cited research totally shows a correlation between gay people and weather patterns.

Don’t play their games. And especially don’t crap on other people’s relationships to do it.

I’m really tired of the implication that every homophobic asswipe in the world is secretly gay. a) It takes all the guilt and responsibility of bigotry off straight people. b) It’s always said in a nasty, gloating, sideways-nudge-nudge sort of way that implies – deliberately or not – that there’s some triumph to be had in this, that it’s a kind of punishment for their vileness, that it’s bad to be gay.